In common with many others, my wife and I had to cancel our summer holiday this year.

It is therefore good to hear that people are once again being allowed to venture further afield and visit hotels, restaurants and beaches.

Of course, the annual holiday is a relatively modern phenomenon. Two hundred years ago, the only holiday most people enjoyed was a HOLY DAY.

Sundays were usually free for personal recreation and travel as well as worship, but the prospect of one or two whole weeks off work, with pay, was beyond the imagination of workers.

In Charles Dickens’ ’Christmas Carol’ Scrooge’s clerk is allowed to celebrate Christmas Day with his family but expected back at work on December 26.

As an incumbent in Exeter Diocese, I once had to administer a small charity. It had been established in the 1850s to provide a morning’s wage for agricultural labourers who wanted to attend church on Good Friday. By 1980, the income from the endowment was a massive £5 a year but, 150 years earlier, that would have enabled a number of men to have half a day ’off’.

As a society, our recognition that the welfare and happiness of those who work, requires rest and recreation, is now beyond doubt. But losing the connection between holidays and holy days, may mean that

we have lost sight of something long held by all major religious faiths, including Christianity. Holy days are not just about doing holy things, whatever they may be. The root of the word ’holiness’ is the same as the word ’wholeness’ and to be ’Holy’ is to be ’whole’. Religions have long accepted the intimate connection between spiritual and physical well being. Holy days are times of rest and recreation as much as they are opportunities for religious worship. Perhaps wholeness comes from understanding that God desires our happiness as well as our holiness.

MARTIN BEAUMONT